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Published July 19, 2022 | Version v1
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Addressing barriers to victims' rights to recovered assets in the mechanism for mutual recognition of freezing and confiscation orders

Description

This paper deals with the normative barriers to victims’ rights to recovered assets and their re-use for social and public purposes. Although the EU legislator has made some efforts to strengthen victims’ rights in the new mechanism for the mutual recognition of freezing and confiscation orders, much still needs to be done. The main difficulties are associated with the fact that the changes introduced in the field of mutual recognition were not accompanied by appropriate changes in the field of harmonisation. EU law does not sufficiently prioritise the rights of the victim to recovered assets over the rights of the state. Other areas requiring improvement are transparency and control over the allocation of recovered assets to social and public purposes. Changes to these fields should foster the restorative function of the asset recovery process and increase the added value of EU criminal law. The ‘tangibility’ of the outcomes of this process can in turn contribute to increasing public confidence in the criminal justice system.

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References

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